We would like to inform you about the publication of our new edited volume, A
Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, by Brill, edited by
Duygu Köksal, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and Anastasia Falierou,
University of Athens.
In A Social History of the Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, Duygu Köksal
and Anastasia Falierou bring together new research on women of different
geographies and communities of the late Ottoman Empire. Making use of archives,
literary works, diaries, newspapers, almanacs, art works or cartoons, the
contributors focus particularly on the ways in which women gained power and
exercised agency in late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. The
articles convincingly show that women’s agency cannot be unearthed without
narrating how women were involved in shaping their own and others’ lives even
in the most unexpected areas of their existence. The women’s activities
described here do not simply reflect modernizing trends or westernizing
attitudes—or their defensive denial. They provide an array of local responses
where ‘the local’ can never be found (and should never be conceptualized)
in its initial, unchanged, or authentic state.
Table of contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication
Acknowledgement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Duygu Köksal, Anastasia Falierou
PART I: Women as Economic Actors: Class, Work and Social Issues
Theater as Career for Ottoman Armenian Women, 1850 to 1910
Hasmik Khalapyan
Searching for Women’s Agency in the Tobacco Workshops: Female Tobacco Workers
of the Province of Selanik
E. Tutku Vardağlı
Working From Home: Division of Labor Among Female Workers of Feshane in Late
Nineteenth Century Istanbul
M. Erdem Kabadayı
PART II: Education for Life: Schools, Associations and Curricula
The Limits of Feminism in Muslim-Turkish Women Writers of the Armistice Period
Elif İkbal Mahir Metinsoy
Between Two Worlds: Education and Accultration of Ottoman Jewish Women
Rachel Simon
Girls’ Institutes and the Rearrangement of the Public and the Private Spheres
in Turkey
Elif Ekin Akşit
PART III: Creating New Lives, Pushing the Boundaries: Ottoman Female Artists
Painting the Late Ottoman Woman: Portrait(s) of Mihri Müşfik Hanım
Burcu Pelvanoğlu
The New Woman in Erotic Popular Literature of 1920s Istanbul
Fatma Türe
PART IV: Womanhood in Print Culture
Enlightened Mothers and Scientific Housewifes: Discussing Women’s Social
Roles in Eurydice (Evridiki) (1870-1873)
Anastasia Falierou
An Almanac for Ottoman Women: Notes on Ebüzziya Tevfik’s Takvîmü’n-nisâ
(1317/1899)
Özgür Türesay
Women’s Representations in Ottoman Cartoons and the Satirical Press on the
Eve of the Kemalist Reforms (1919-1924)
François Georgon
Part V: Dilemmas of Nationalism: Debating Modernity, Identity and Women’s
Agency
From a Critique of the Orient to a Critique of Modernity: A
Greek-Ottoman-American Writer, Demetra Vaka (1877-1946)
Duygu Köksal
The ‘Tomboy’ and the Aristocrat: Nabawiyya Mûsâ and Malak Hifnî Nâsif,
Pioneers of Egyptian Feminism
Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen
Hayriye Melek (Hunc), a Circassian Ottoman Writer between Feminism and
Nationalism
Alexandre Toumarkine
Notes on Contributors
Index
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